Hello I'm Mike Manley, welcome to my studio Blog. I am veteran comic and animation artist and I created and edit Draw! Magazine. This blog is a chronicle of what's happening in my studio. Follow my process and path as an painter, cartoonist and teacher and find out how they inform and enrich each other!

Wednesday, February 10, 2016

Judge Parker Process

Here are the pencils and inks from an upcoming Sunday strip. The more characters there are the smaller the drawing gets per panel which makes this a bit tougher---as well as drawing the horses. But I cheated by tossing them into shadow.

4 comments:

Wonderful work as always While you might consider it a cheat to throw those horses into shadow, I consider it great framing. It also reminded me that the use of the silhouette has become lost in modern comic books, although, happily, it is still used on occasion in newspaper strips.

It also served to remind me of all the other great things that were formerly a part of the comics vocabulary that are rarely, if ever used: thought balloons, whisper outlines, motion lines coming off of characters, flashback panel outlines, among others. These are things that civilians recognize as comic conventions.

Thanks Oscar. Yes, a cheat but a good cheat and yes, a framing device. I remember reading or hearing some old axiom that every 3 pages you employed a silhouette. I think this might have been more with humor comics to break things up. But Crane, Caniff,Robbins etc., used them a lot. I love the old comic conventions style wise. I think modern comics are embarrassed by them because they seek comics to be "real".

Why is the Judge Parker comic strip so utterly racist? I have yet to see one non-white in the strip. To think we have a President who is black, and almost all our cartoon characters are white or animals.

My Comic Art Tumbler

My Art Tumbler

My Photography Tumbler

MY IMDB PAGE

DRAW! Magazine NO.34 ON SALE NOW!

Draw #34 takes you from Middle Earth to a Galaxy Far Far Away with award-winning illustrator Greg Hildebrandt! As one of the Hildebrandt Brothers (along with his late brother Tim), Greg has been charging our imaginations for almost 60 years, and now Draw! goes in-depth with this Grand Master to reveal his techniques and working methods. Then we dive under the waves with Brad Walker (Aquaman, Guardians of the Galaxy, Birds of Prey, Legends of the Dark Knight) for a how-to interview and demo. Plus there’s regular columnist Jerry Ordway’s tutorial, Jamar Nicholas reviewing the latest art supplies, and Bret Blevins and Draw! editor Mike Manley’s Comic Art Bootcamp complete the circle of artistic goodness.